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Flood and Water Management Bill

My Lords, I am always grateful for all contributions to the Committee but I am particularly grateful for the helpful one that has taken a good chunk out of my speech. The noble Baroness, Lady Young, is right to say that I am against lists. The difficulty lies in how exhaustive one can make lists—they are always there to be added to. Therefore, I am going to argue against these amendments, although I very much appreciate the opportunity that they have provided for an extensive debate about the various interests involved. The one contribution to which I am afraid I have no response is that of the noble Baroness, Lady Byford. I do not know what to do about consultation blight, which is what I think she identified. In fact, areas that are subject to potential consultation about risk suffer from the fact that they have been identified as being at risk. I do not think that there is any way round that difficulty. It is obvious that it is the job of the authorities which manage risk to identify potential risk, and I am enjoined on all sides of the Committee to say that appropriate consultation should take place. I am not going to dissent from that at all. I am totally in favour of consultation. I shall merely indicate that the Bill makes provision for that. I take up the point that the noble Baroness Lady Young just identified: we cannot do this properly through lists. The process is bound to carry difficulties and I sympathise entirely with the noble Baroness’s point, but I am not sure that there is much that we can do about risk management and coping with water and its problems without taking actions that, as she has indicated, might cause concern in an area. The only safeguard for that is that the risk has to be accurately defined. We must avoid areas being blighted by consultation about a risk that is non-existent and people therefore suffering in a totally unsatisfactory way that is unjustified. Every other noble Lord who has spoken in this debate has indicated the value of consultation. We are being rather more specific about it. I want to clear up one other point. I hear what the noble Baroness, Lady Knight, identifies. I am aware that neither Northampton nor Birmingham, nor indeed many other places, have any concern about coastal erosion, but we have to put coastal erosion in alongside flood management because some local authorities have both. Take a place like Haisborough on the Norfolk coast, for instance; if we put it down just for risk management with regard to water but did not identify just what threat was represented by coastal erosion, we would be enormously neglectful of our duties. Noble Lords opposite—the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, the noble Earl, Lord Cathcart, and others—will testify to this aspect with regard to parts of eastern England. We have no option but to include this. I hear what she also says, that there is a danger that people can go off the point in local authority meetings. People can go off the point in almost all meetings, but I cannot imagine that the city of Birmingham is going to spend too much of its time worrying about coastal erosion, even if it considers the issues of water management, which it may well have to do in the framework of the Bill.